This company has a fantastic looking professional website, and an easy to use ordering process. Graphic designers and web designers such as myself with tight deadlines and a need to produce finished designs often outsource some image clipping/masking work to other designers who are more proficient or specialize in doing this time-consuming work more quickly than we can - enabling us to continue working on other aspects of a project.
I was impressed as a first time visitor and referral to deepetch.com by another fellow graphic designer who suggested them. I should have asked him if he'd actually used their services or if he had just heard of them and pointed me to their site. Either way - an expensive service I was convinced by the sample images they use on their website to promote the quality of the results they deliver that they were well worth the cost - I shelled out the $ for credits, placed my order (simple masking jobs) and uploaded several images of models posing against very plain backgrounds which I needed to have the models 'clipped' via the 'masking' services from the photos' background so I could superimpose the models against a different background for the website I'm building.
Turnaround time is extremely good - I got the files back within 24 hours. I'll give them that. But like the old saying goes, you can have it fast and cheap but not good, or you can have fast and good but not cheap... Etc.in this case, it was fast, but NOT cheap — and definitely NOT GOOD!
If you know anything about Photoshop you know the "magic wand" tool is a cheater/cheesy way to grab a color and alter or delete it from an image but the results are not usually good if there is not a distinct clipping path (as in black and white) - so when a more complex image is involved, a pro will use the more advanced techniques advertised by deepetch.com to 'cut out' parts of an image away. To me, it looked like the folks at deepetch.com just clicked the magic wand tool outside the model and hit 'delete' like some amateur! I stink at doing clipping/masking (don't have the patience for one thing) and I could have done a better job than these so-called "professionals"!!!
The images that I got back speak for themselves - even an inexperienced eye can see that they look terrible.in particular, the holy grail of designer clipping is to be able to get hair cut out (not cut, but cut out) due to it's highly irregular shape it's not easy to do, BUT deepetch.com shows images in their website ads/samples of their work that show before and after images of a model with curly hair blowing in the wind that is perfectly cut out from a 'before' picture against a landscape background to an 'after' picture of her against a plain white background with every curl and every hair perfectly the same.
With MY models' photos, the hair area was blotchy, blurred, pixelated (jagged edges), and still had the original images' background color showing in not just tiny places but in big blobs of color matted in with the models' hair. Even a male model with a short/straight hairstyle had jagged edges of dark gray (background color of original image) like oil clinging to his blond head.
I was interested to see that when I went back to the contact form on the deepetch.com website there was a drop-down menu option for the nature of the contact that included "complaints" on the menu. Hmmm. I'm guessing if that is a menu option on their contact form, then it's a commonly needed one. Sure wish I'd seen that before I placed my order (spent my $) with deepetch.com.
It's not only the money, now. It's the disappointment and the anticipation of getting a very time consuming and difficult task handled and looking forward to making a huge step forward on a big project in order to meet client's expectations and deadline - that now it put way behind as I either decide to do this painstaking work myself or search out another service who can do a good job for me.
I have filed a complaint via their contact form and an autoresponder has informed me I will hear from them within 60 minutes (tick tock tick tock). I've demanded a full refund of my $ not just credits, since I will never use those credits since I will never use deepetch.com ever again.
I'll keep this updated with any results as they develop - just wanted to get the word out asap to warn others of the extremely poor quality of work from deepetch.com and to tell you 'DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE' their advertising is false... What you see is NOT WHAT YOU GET.
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